As is their habit, groups and individuals of the fundamentalist tendency initially attack the rights of women. That is seen not only in totalitarian countries where religion serves as the political program, but also in Canada, the United States, and France, where the state is supposed to be independent of religious powers. . . . The rise of religious fundamentlaism in the world is not without effect on Canadian and Québécois societies. (Micheline Carrier, "Est-ce de l'islamophobie de critiquer l'intégrisme islamiste ?" Trans. Yoshie Furuhashi, Sisyphe.org, 21 November 2007)

Fundamentalist Islam is a problem in such countries as the Gulf states, but the author blows the problem out of its proportion by sounding a false alarm that Canada, of all places, is vulnerable to it. Just how many Muslims are in Canada? According to the 2001 census, Muslims constituted merely 2% of the total Canadian population, and their proportion was estimated to be about 2.5% in 2006, of whom only a tiny minority must be fundamentalists -- if anything, Canada's points system of immigration, which favors the better off and better educated, means that many Muslim immigrants in Canada, like other immigrants, tend to be liberals of the "professional-managerial class" (to use Barbara and John Ehrenreich's term), given the correlation among class, education, and ideology.

Instead, the Québécois ought to be asking themselves: does not anti-immigrant xenophobia, coupled with Islamophobia, undermine the Québécois struggle to fight for Québec's Francophone culture and equality with or independence from the rest of Canada, by chasing away Francophone Muslim immigrants?